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In this video, we will have a quick introduction of Ansible.

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We'll find out what Ansible is.

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Ansible is an open source software provisioning, configuration management and application deployment

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tool enabling infrastructure as code.

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It runs on many Unix Unix like systems and can configure both Unix like systems as well as Microsoft

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Windows.

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And that's the exact definition that we have from Wikipedia.

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So to put it in a simple words or I would say my definition, Ansible is basically a free automation

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tool that can automate it tasks on local machine where Ansible is running and on remote machine.

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So anything that you wanted to automate like a regular daily tasks for your IT needs, you could use

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Ansible to automate that.

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All right.

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So let's visualize it and understand exactly the purpose or how Ansible works.

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So let's say if you have a Linux machine or a Windows machine and you wanted to configure Apache in

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IT or NTP server or anything that you want to configure.

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So what do you do?

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You log into that machine as a session to it and configure it.

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Beautiful.

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What if you have two machines?

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Well, you could do the same thing, log in and configure it.

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And if you have three machines again, you can log into the third machine, ssh into it and configure

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it.

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All right.

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That works in a smaller environment.

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Now, what if you have three, six, nine, 12 thousands or thousands of machines, for example, in

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a larger environment, are you going to log into every single machine if you have to change a configuration

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on or similar configuration on all of them?

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No.

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Right.

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It would be very cumbersome and it will take you a lot of time to log into every single machine and

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make that change.

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That's where you create an Ansible server or that's where the Ansible tool is born.

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So you set up an Ansible server, which is also known as a control node.

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You install the Ansible software onto that machine, then you log into that machine using S-H the same

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way you will log into any Linux machine, and then you make the change to a configuration file on that

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control node and then push that configuration to all the different nodes or make the change to all the

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configuration of all the machines.

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See how easy it becomes when you do that through one server.

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Please note Ansible is written in Python language, but it does not mean you need Python knowledge to

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use Ansible because Ansible has provided a very easy language to use to automate your task, which we'll

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cover later on.

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All right.

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Ansible can be used to provisioned system, meaning you could actually build systems from scratch using

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Ansible.

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Ansible is also used to configure those systems.

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Now you have the operating system build.

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A system is ready.

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Now you have to configure the system, meaning services or which way you want your system to work.

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Once that is done, then you could deploy applications as well.

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Let's say if you have to install Apache application or SAP application or database on your system,

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then you could deploy those applications using Ansible.

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Once those are deployed, it doesn't end here.

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You could manage those systems and applications using Ansible.

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So if you have to upgrade your system, for example, six months from now or after the deployment,

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then you could use Ansible to do that.

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Now let's take a look at a few examples of the tasks that can be automated.

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Using Ansible provisioning, which we have already have talked about, you could actually provision

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your bare metal server, virtualization systems, network devices, storage system, cloud platform.

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Also you could do system configuration, as I mentioned.

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What are the examples of system configurations such as updates or upgrades, package installation,

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a service configuration, stop, start restart of any services that can be done using Ansible users

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and groups, you could create one user on one server, or you could create that same user to multiple

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servers at the same time.

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Assigning permissions to files and directories.

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Moving on, you could use application deployment backups weekly or monthly system reboots.

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Orchestration.

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What is orchestration?

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Orchestration is a way of automating your system step by step in a specific order.

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So let's take an example of e commerce and e commerce.

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You have to have application setup, database setup and Web services.

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So you could actually let the system know through orchestration.

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And that orchestration wraps around Ansible that it should reboot or restart application services,

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database services, and then it should start the Web services.

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Everything happens in a certain order.

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That is an orchestration that you could actually have that within Ansible to handle it.

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So that's how Ansible works or.

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Quick overview of Ansible.

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In this video, we will cover a brief history of Ansible.

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The Ansible project was started in 2012 by Michael de Haan.

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It is an open source and community driven and I'm sure you know the open source and the community driven.

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When people get together from different part of the world toward one goal, to build a tool and open

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source is you could build your own code and add that to that tool to enhance features.

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Then Ansible Incorporation was purchased by Red Hat in 2015.

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When it's purchased even today, it is still open source but certain part or certain features of it.

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Say if Ansible can be purchased from RedHat such as Ansible Tower, or if you need a subscription for

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support or consulting that you could buy from RedHat, it is available from for most of the Linux distributions,

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such as Red Hat, Santos, Fedora, a Bantu, Debian and sushi.

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Now Ansible can only be installed.

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The engine itself can only be installed on Linux systems.

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You cannot install on Windows servers.

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However, you could manage and automate Windows Systems task using Ansible.

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All right.

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Let's take a quick look at the need of Ansible once again, very fast.

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Infrastructure management, especially the virtualization, when we have thousands of thousand virtual

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machines and we build the virtual machines in a very fast, fast way, you don't want to build them

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manually.

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It becomes cumbersome and tedious.

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That's when you use ansible configuration management for system and application multi-tier application

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automation like orchestration, single point of automation.

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Meaning if you have a one server like Ansible, you could change everything on that server and then

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push it out to all the rest of the world or meaning rest of the virtual machines.